Need help deciding what to do with my broken-but-functional X99 Classy board.

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dr/owned

Gawd
Joined
Feb 21, 2012
Messages
577
So I need to poll the audience on this one.

Long story short, I broke one of the retention clips on a DIMM socket. It took enough plastic with it that 1 of the contacts is completely exposed. I plugged in a memory stick and it still worked fine.

EVGA isn't going to cover it because it's physical damage. And they're going to charge 65/hr to repair and they have no estimate of how much it's total going to cost to repair, nor if it's even possible to repair (honestly I have no idea how one goes about repairing a component as large as a dimm socket). Frankly I think considering this is their top of the line board they should be offering some good will discount on a new board to keep me as their customer.

So basically it's a crapshoot- do I spend $10 shipping the board to EVGA for repair at probably 2 hours @ $65/hr and risk them saying "nope can't fix it...here's your board back". Or do I just selling it straight up for $100 or whatever (costs $400 new)?


And here's a pic of what a $1000 fuck up looks like:



How does this already cost $1000? Because I had to overnight a Asus Rampage V Extreme board. Overnight a set of mosfet and chipset waterblocks for it, and overnight a bunch of static protection stuff so I took no chances in reassembling everything. All to be back up and running within 36 hours:

 
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If you already have the R5E up and running, why bother spending extra to repair the Classy? Either sell it or if you can't, toss it. Or am I missing something here?
 
n=1 said:
If you already have the R5E up and running, why bother spending extra to repair the Classy? Either sell it or if you can't, toss it. Or am I missing something here?
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Basically comes down to selling it in a broken state or sending it out for repair, hoping it is repairable, and will increase the value some since it can then be sold as refurbished. To me it seems like a wash because trying to explain it's broken but still works fine is going to be offputting to tons of people. But then it might cost a lot just to ship it around and get it repaired.
 
Yeah I'd say don't bother. EVGA didn't guarantee they'd be able to repair it, or if they charge $200 to repair this then you're still SOL.

I'd do as you said try to sell it for $100, and explain it still works fine. If the buyer wants to repair the board then they can pay for it themselves.
 
Sell it as-is. There's bound to be someone who's fine with using 2 or 3 ram slots instead of 4.
 
Board level repairs like that are pretty straight forward if you have the tools.

You need a soldering station, a hollow soldering tip that is hooked to a vacuum pump.

Heat each pin, suck away the solder remove the socket. Stick the new socket back in place, re-solder each pin.

Figure an hour labor plus the price of the socket and solder.

If you have a really good TV/Audio repair shop in your town they can do it as well; note, I said good one..

All that aside, if it's working....Why bother?
 
Too bad that is slot one and that odd slots have to populated first or I would have given you $100 on the spot. I would never even use 2-4-6-8.

How does that even happen?

My condolences for an awesome board.

I would send it. I bet they can repair it like Bill says. Either way your out money and that way you still have a board. Oh and that discount on a new board, more likely to happen if they have that one to look at and there is a dialogue taking place.
They might decide that the slot was made with faulty plastic or some shit. You never know with EVGA.
 
wrangler said:
Too bad that is slot one and that odd slots have to populated first or I would have given you $100 on the spot. I would never even use 2-4-6-8.
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I've used plenty of motherboards that had absolutely no issues with slot one not being populated. It's common when heatsinks sit too close to the ram slots themselves.
 
techrat said:
I've used plenty of motherboards that had absolutely no issues with slot one not being populated. It's common when heatsinks sit too close to the ram slots themselves.
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On that motherboard, it is specified in the manual that 1-3-5-7 must be populated first or the board will not boot. It can be only one dimm, but it must be in an odd numbered slot or, again, the board will not boot.

http://www.evga.com/support/manuals/

"The Intel X99 chipset supports quad channel memory; supports a maximum of 128GB of DDR4 and up to 3000MHz+ (OC) in quad channel configuration. It is required to populate an odd slot (1, 3, 5, 7) first. The board will not boot if only even slots (2, 4, 6, 8) are populated."
(from the manual)
 
-To clarify: yes it's slot 1 and yes there has to be a ram stick there or it won't boot. I don't think I tried slot 3 by itself, but slots 3 5 7 populated didn't boot. I did a wing and a prayer and gently reinstalled a stick into the busted slot 1 and it was OK and booted fine.

-I was trying to diagnose a bad ram stick because half my ram was being detected (16 GB instead of 32 GB). I was laying on my side having to work around my watercooling tubing and pushed with the ram stick not seated properly. It slipped off and pried the retention thing apart. Access to my desktop is basically an awkward position. No where near as nice as having a board laying flat on a table.

-Conclusion I've come to is I'll just try to sell it here for $150 or something TBD and if no one wants it here I'll dump it on ebay. At this point I really don't even want the hassle of setting up an RMA and shipping it around and waiting for it to come back.


-And I eventually figured out after installing the RVE that it was some of the ram sticks that were faulty. New set and 32GB came back. Which is good because I was worried I blew out the memory controller on the CPU with aggressive overclocking when I installed the original set in the RVE and still only had 16GB. It probably somehow happened when I took the mobo out of my case to install waterblocks on it. When I installed the RVE and plumbed it and all that I pulled out all the stops and was using professional level ESD protection.
 
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wrangler said:
On that motherboard, it is specified in the manual that 1-3-5-7 must be populated first or the board will not boot. It can be only one dimm, but it must be in an odd numbered slot or, again, the board will not boot.

http://www.evga.com/support/manuals/

"The Intel X99 chipset supports quad channel memory; supports a maximum of 128GB of DDR4 and up to 3000MHz+ (OC) in quad channel configuration. It is required to populate an odd slot (1, 3, 5, 7) first. The board will not boot if only even slots (2, 4, 6, 8) are populated."
(from the manual)
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Huh, Interesting. Does this mean the board does not support any other operation but quad channel configs? Eg, could you do a dual channel config by populating 5 and 7 only?
 
Did the piece that broke come out all in one piece? If so, some careful use of plastic repair epoxy should fix it right up and be just as strong if not stronger than new.
 
techrat said:
Huh, Interesting. Does this mean the board does not support any other operation but quad channel configs? Eg, could you do a dual channel config by populating 5 and 7 only?
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The board supports dual channel and single channel. I'm not sure which slots have to be populated, but it seems the odd slots have to be populated first. When only half my ram was being reported, it was also working in dual channel mode instead of quad.
 
Semi-off topic - but which board do you prefer? I am in the market for a big boss X99 board. Currently looking at the MSI X99S XPower AC, the RVE, the X99 Deluxe, and the X99 Classified.
 
sk3tch said:
Semi-off topic - but which board do you prefer? I am in the market for a big boss X99 board. Currently looking at the MSI X99S XPower AC, the RVE, the X99 Deluxe, and the X99 Classified.
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There's tradeoffs to both. The RVE has a lot more detailed BIOS (almost too many options that no one will ever touch). I felt like the Classy was a lot quicker to work with. Set multiplier, set voltage, and Auto everything else takes care of it. The RVE I still have no idea how to use voltage offset because it doesn't seem to tell me what the base voltage it's offsetting *from* is.

I didn't like that the RVE forces you to use specific slots for SLI. On the Classy board, all of the PCI-e x16 (full length) slots are pinned for x16. On the RVE the second x16 slot is only pinned for x8 (only has half the slot filled with contacts). I had to move my second video card to the 3rd or 4th slot to get SLI working because SLI won't work if the second card isn't running in x8 or x16.

The RVE has waterblocks available for it. The Classy you have to buy a custom made block that costs 1.5x as much and the quality isn't amazing IMO.

I don't like that the RVE has 8 pin + 4 pin CPU power. This really only matters if you're going for an insane overclock, but I wasn't happy seeing 30A on one of my 12V rails and 20A on the other, because of the uneven CPU power pin setup. (yes I was slamming ~ 600W through the VRMs). The AX series of PSUs can handle it because it's single rail. If you have something like the Lepa 1600W, you're screwed because it's a bunch of 20A rails. 8 + 4 pin is also only good for 450W according to ATX specs, so slamming 600W through it is really pushing it. The classy has 2x8 pin.

I don't think the RVE is worth the price premium over the Classy.

For all the bullshit marketing about "OC Socket", my chip overclocked the exact same. If anything I think my 4.6 Ghz overclock was a bit more stable on the Classy. I'm not one to spend hours tweaking every minor voltage to get an overclock stable, so maybe EVGA just has better "Auto" settings than Asus does.

I do like that the RVE has integrated Wifi + BT. I use ethernet 99% of the time, but it's still nice to have some redundancy plus the ability to connect to my phone.

EVGA has better warranty support than Asus. Notwithstanding physically breaking your board like I did, EVGA picks up the phone at 11PM and has cross shipping and next day delivery and crap like that (if you pay for it).

Basically, I'd vote Classy.
 
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I think I'd sell it fairly cheap (clearly stating the issue to the seller) and cut my losses
 
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